Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (19 page)

Google, amazingly quickly, became a beloved brand, something many people see as bigger than themselves, something bigger than hope. Apple lives in this arena as well. I think if you deliver hope for a long time (and deliver on it sometimes), you can graduate to love. Ronald Reagan was beloved, even when he was making significant long-term errors. So was JFK. Hillary may be respected, but Obama is loved.

I don’t think love is often a one-way street, either. Brands that are loved usually start the process by loving their customers in advance.

The easiest way to build a brand is to sell fear. The best way, though, may be to deliver on hope while aiming for love.

I was brainstorming with my friend Jay today and he put this picture into my head.

Most of the time we do the work. The work comprises our initiative and our reactions and our responses and our output. The work comprises the decisions we make and the people we hire.

The work is what people talk about, because it’s what we experience. In other words, the work tells a story.

But what if you haven’t figured out a story yet?

Then the work is random. Then the story is confused or bland or indifferent and it doesn’t spread.

On the other hand, if you decide what the story is, you can do work that matches the story. Your decisions will match the story. The story will become true because you’re living it.

Does Starbucks tell a different story from McDonald’s? Of course they do. But look how the work they do matches those stories—from the benefits they offer employees to the decisions they make about packaging or locations.

Same is true for that little consulting firm down the street vs. McKinsey. While the advice may end up being similar, each firm lives a story in whom they hire, how they present themselves, etc.

The story creates the work, and the work creates the story.

Sometimes, what you do is done as well as it can be done. It’s a service that people truly love, or a product they can’t live without. You’re doing everything right, but it’s not remarkable, at least not in the sense of “worth making a remark about.”

What’s up with that?

Here’s a smorgasbord of reasons:

1. It’s embarrassing to talk about. That’s why VD screening, no matter how well done, rarely turns into a viral [ahem] success.
   
2. There’s no easy way to bring it up. This is similar to item number 1 but involves opportunity. It’s easy to bring up “hey, where’d you get that ring tone?” because the ring tone just interrupted everyone. It’s a lot harder to bring up the fact that you just got a massage.
   
3. It might not feel cutting edge enough for your crowd. So, it’s not the thing that’s embarrassing; it’s the fact that you just found out about it. Don’t bring up your brand-new Tivo with your friends from MIT. They’ll sneer at you.
   
4. On a related front, it might feel too popular to profitably sneeze about. Sometimes bloggers hesitate to post on a popular source or topic because they worry that they’ll seem lazy.
   
5. You might like the exclusivity. If you have no trouble getting into a great restaurant or a wonderful club, perhaps you won’t tell the masses because you’re selfish.
   
6. You might want to keep worlds from colliding. Some kids, for example, like the idea of being the only kid from their school at the summer camp they go to. They get to have two personalities, be two people, keep things separate.
   
7. You might feel manipulated. Plenty of hip kids were happy to talk about Converse, but once big, bad Nike got involved, it felt different. Almost like they were being used.
   
8. You might worry about your taste. Recommending a wine really strongly takes guts, because maybe, just maybe, your friends will hate the wine and think you tasteless.
   
9. There are probably ten other big reasons, but they all lead to the same conclusions:
   

First, understand that people talk about you (or don’t talk about you) because of how it makes them feel, not how it makes you feel.

Second, if you’re going to build a business around word of mouth, better not have these things working against you.

Third, if you do, it may be a smart strategy to work directly to overcome them. That probably means changing the fundamental DNA of your experience and the story you tell to your users. “If you like us, tell your friends” might feel like a fine start, but it’s certainly not going to get you there.

What
will
change the game is actually changing the game. Changing the experience of talking about you so fundamentally that people will choose to do it.

Copy gets in the way.

Actually,
thinking
about copy gets in the way. You start writing and then you patch and layer and write and dissemble and defend and write and the next thing you know, you’ve killed it.

So, try this instead:

Write a classified ad. What’s the offer? What do you want me to do? You’re paying by the word!

“Lose weight now. Join our gym.”

Six words. Promise and offer.

Now, you can make it longer. Of course, if your gym is on the space station and it’s the only gym around, and if the people reading your ad are looking at the bulletin board and seeking out what they want, then your ad is now long enough.

But most of the time, in most settings, a little longer is better. So, add a few words or even a sentence. Is it better? More effective? Gently and carefully add words until it’s as effective as possible, but as short as possible.

Perhaps you want to make your promise more vivid, or more clear. Perhaps you need a testimonial or two to back up your promise. Perhaps your call to action needs to be more urgent. You can play with all of that, keeping in mind the original classified ad, keeping in mind that you’re still paying by the word (because attention is expensive).

And yes, this principle applies to articles in the newspaper, to blog posts, to how-to books, and to direct marketing letters. It applies to the emails you send and the copy on your website, too.

You really don’t understand a concept until you know what it’s made of. The taxonomy of marketing (filled with a bazillion tactics) is murky at best. The tactics are so numerous, expensive, and sometimes emotional that we easily focus on the urgent instead of the important. Perhaps we could try a different approach.

Never mind the Ps. Marketing has five elements:

Data

Stories

Products (services)

Interactions

Connection

DATA
are observational. What do people actually do? Walmart uses data to decide if an end cap is working. Google AdWords advertisers use data to decide which copy delivers clicks and sales. The library can use data to decide which books to buy (and which not to buy). Paco
Underhill uses data to turbo-charge retail. Data are powerful, overlooked, and sometimes mistaken for boring. You don’t have to understand the why; you merely need to know the what.

STORIES
define everything you say and do. The product has a myth; the service has a legend. Marketing applies to every person, every job, every service, and every organization. That’s because all we can work with as humans is stories. I want to argue that data and stories are the two key building blocks of marketing—the other three are built on these two.

PRODUCTS
(and services) are physical manifestations of the story. If your story is that you are cutting edge and faster/newer/better, then your products better be. “Average products for average people” is a common story, but not one that spreads. When in doubt, re-imagine the product. Push it to be the story, to live the story, to create a myth.

INTERACTIONS
are all the tactics the marketer uses to actually touch the prospect or customer. Interactions range from spam to billboards, from the way you answer the phone to the approach you take to an overdue bill. Interactions are the hero of marketing, because there are so many and most of them are cheap. Unfortunately, all lazy marketers can do is buy ads or spam people. And that creates an interaction that belies your story, right?

CONNECTION
is the highest level of enlightenment, the end goal. Connection between you and the customer, surely, but mostly connection between customers. Great marketers create bands of brothers, tribes of people who wish each other well and want to belong. Get the first four steps right and you may get a shot at this one.

Some questions marketers must ask: Does this interaction lead to connections? Do our products support our story? Is the story pulling in numbers that demonstrate that it’s working?

In that light, what are you working on? If it’s not one of these five, and not going to seriously change the dynamic of your marketing, why exactly are you bothering?

My guess is that your organization spends almost all of its time on the interactions. Once you see the world through the prism of the five pieces, you can get in balance. Or you could be Jack Nicholson.

One day, you may be lucky enough to have a scarcity problem. A product or a service or even a job that’s in such high demand that people are clamoring for more than you can make.

We can learn a lot from the abysmal performance of Apple this weekend. They took a hot product and totally botched the launch because of a misunderstanding of the benefits and uses of scarcity.

First, understand that scarcity is a choice. If you raise your price, scarcity goes away. If your product is going to be scarce, it’s either because you benefit from that or because your organization is forbidden to use price as a demand-adjustment tool. I’m going to assume the former. (But I riff a bit on the latter toward the end.)

Why be scarce?

• Scarcity creates fashion. People want something that others can’t have.
  
• Lines create demand. People want something that others want.
  
• Scarcity also creates word of mouth, because people talk about lines and shortages and hot products.
  
• And finally, scarcity drives your product to the true believers, the ones most likely to spread the word and ignite the ideavirus. Because they expended effort to acquire your product or service, they’re not only more likely to talk about it, but they’ve also self-selected as the sort of person likely to talk about it.
  

The danger is that you can kill long-term loyalty. You can annoy your best customers. You can spread negative word of mouth. You can train people to hate your scarcity strategy (Apple did all four this weekend).

Take a look at the guy in the photo. That’s the goal. He feels great. He’s a hero, at least for a moment, all because he stood in line all night. He gets to talk about it, and others (not everyone, but enough) aspire to be him next time. You reward the tribe and you build the tribe at the same time.

The problem is that our knee-jerk way of dealing with scarcity is to treat everyone the same and to have people “pay” by spending time to indicate their desire.

Waiting in line is a very old-school way of dealing with scarcity. And treating new customers like old customers, treating unknown customers the same as high-value customers, is painful and unnecessary.